The head of a prestigious US public university resigned Friday amid pressure over his alleged failure to curb diversity programs, the latest salvo in the Trump administration’s war on academia.

The Department of Justice had privately pressured the University of Virginia to fire its president to help resolve a probe of its diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, according to the New York Times, which broke the story late Thursday.

It had reportedly threatened to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding.

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“I cannot make a unilateral decision to fight the federal government in order to save my own job,” UVA President Jim Ryan said in a statement Friday.

Ryan wrote that risking federal funding cuts by staying in his role “would not only be quixotic but appear selfish and self-centered to the hundreds of employees who would lose their jobs, the researchers who would lose their funding, and the hundreds of students who could lose financial aid or have their visas withheld.”

Ryan took the helm of the elite University of Virginia in 2018, a year after white supremacists marched with flaming torches through its campus amid heated debate over the removal of some Confederate monuments in southern states.

Ryan’s efforts to make the school more diverse and increase the number of first-generation university students reportedly rankled some conservative alumni.

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“It is outrageous that officials in the Trump Department of Justice demanded the Commonwealth’s globally recognized university remove President Ryan — a strong leader who has served UVA honorably and moved the university forward — over ridiculous ‘culture war’ traps,” Virginia’s two Democratic senators, Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, said in statement.

Trump is attacking US universities and other sources of what he sees as left-leaning power in the country as he moves to exert unprecedented presidential control over life in America.

A top area of conflict has been “diversity, equity and inclusion,” or DEI, programs that sought to correct historic demographic inequity in admissions and funding, but have been criticized as unfair to otherwise well-qualified candidates.

Trump notably piled pressure on Harvard University, seeking to ban it from having foreign students, slashing more than $3 billion in grants and contracts, and challenging its tax-free status.

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Some observers said Friday’s developments were an alarming sign for public universities, which are particularly reliant on state and federal funding.

“Ryan’s resignation portends a future in which all public university presidents must conform to the political views of their state’s leadership or be kicked out of office,” wrote Inside Higher Ed, an online publication about education.

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The president of the University of Virginia, James E. Ryan, has resigned after the Trump administration demanded he step down to settle a civil rights investigation, according to a media report on Friday.

According to a report by the New York Times, the US Justice Department warned the university’s board that the school could lose hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding unless Ryan were removed.

The investigation focused on the university’s diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, which university officials said were violating civil rights laws.

Citing sources familiar with the matter, the report stated that Ryan, who had planned to leave at the end of the next academic year, submitted his resignation early, “with deep sadness.”

The report noted that his resignation will take effect no later than Aug. 15, 2025.

Earlier on Thursday, the same newspaper reported that the Justice Department wrote to the university’s board on June 17, stating that its patience was “wearing thin” and that race-based practices were “widespread” at the school.

The report further stated that some board members, including those appointed by Virginia’s Republican governor, had been in contact with federal officials and were told that removing Ryan was the only way to resolve the issue.

The president of the University of Virginia has resigned his position under pressure from the United States Department of Justice, which pushed for his departure amid scrutiny of the school’s diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) practices.

In an email sent to the university community on Friday and circulated on social media, university president James Ryan said he was resigning to protect the institution from facing the ire of the government.

“I cannot make a unilateral decision to fight the federal government in order to save my own job,” he wrote.

“To do so would not only be quixotic but appear selfish and self-centered to the hundreds of employees who would lose their jobs, the researchers who would lose their funding, and the hundreds of students who could lose financial aid or have their visas withheld.”

Ryan’s resignation has been accepted by the board, two sources told The New York Times, which first broke the story. It remains unclear exactly when he will leave his post.

His departure is the latest indication of ongoing tensions between the administration of President Donald Trump and the academic community.

During his second term, President Trump has increasingly sought to reshape higher education by attacking diversity initiatives, pushing for crackdowns on pro-Palestinian student protesters, and seeking reviews of hiring and enrollment practices.

Ryan’s departure marks a new frontier in a campaign that has almost exclusively targeted Ivy League schools. Critics also say it shows a shift in the government’s rationale, away from allegations of rampant anti-Semitism on campus and towards more aggressive policing of diversity initiatives.

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Just a day prior, the Justice Department announced it would investigate another public school, the University of California, for its use of diversity standards.

Ryan, who has led the University of Virginia since 2018, faced criticism that he failed to heed federal orders to eliminate DEI policies.

An anonymous source told The Associated Press news agency that his removal was pushed by the Justice Department as a way to help resolve an inquiry targeting the school.

Ted Mitchell, the president of the American Council on Education, called Ryan’s ouster an example of the Trump administration using “thuggery instead of rational discourse”.

“This is a dark day for the University of Virginia, a dark day for higher education, and it promises more of the same,” Mitchell said. “It’s clear the administration is not done and will use every tool that it can make or invent to exert its will over higher education.”

Virginia’s Democratic senators react

In a joint statement, Virginia’s senators, both Democrats, said it was outrageous that the Trump administration would demand Ryan’s resignation over “‘culture war’ traps”.

“This is a mistake that hurts Virginia’s future,” Senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine said.

After campaigning on a promise to end “wokeness” in education, Trump signed an executive order in January calling for an end to federal funding that would support educational institutions with DEI programming.

He accused schools of indoctrinating “children in radical, anti-American ideologies” without the permission of their parents.

The Department of Education has since opened investigations into dozens of colleges, arguing that diversity initiatives discriminate against white and Asian American students.

The response from schools has been scattered. Some have closed DEI offices, ended diversity scholarships and no longer require diversity statements as part of the hiring process. Still, others have held firm on diversity policies.

The University of Virginia became a flashpoint after conservative critics accused it of simply renaming its DEI initiatives. The school’s governing body voted to shutter the DEI office in March and end diversity policies in admissions, hiring, financial aid and other areas.

Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin celebrated the action, declaring that “DEI is done at the University of Virginia”.

But America First Legal, a conservative group founded by Trump aide Stephen Miller, said that DEI had simply taken another form at the school. In a May letter to the Justice Department, the group said the university chose to “rename, repackage, and redeploy the same unlawful infrastructure under a lexicon of euphemisms”.

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The group directly took aim at Ryan, noting that he joined hundreds of other college presidents in signing a public statement condemning the “overreach and political interference” of the Trump administration.

On Friday, the group said it will continue to use every available tool to root out what it has called discriminatory systems.

“This week’s developments make clear: public universities that accept federal funds do not have a license to violate the Constitution,” Megan Redshaw, a lawyer with the group, said in a statement. “They do not get to impose ideological loyalty tests, enforce race and sex-based preferences, or defy lawful executive authority.”

Until now, the White House had directed most of its attention at Harvard University and other elite institutions that Trump sees as bastions of liberalism.

Harvard has lost more than $2.6bn in federal research grants amid its battle with the government, which also attempted to block the school from hosting foreign students and threatened to revoke its tax-exempt status.

Harvard and its $53bn endowment are uniquely positioned to weather the government’s financial pressure.

Public universities, however, are far more dependent on taxpayer money and could be more vulnerable. The University of Virginia’s $10bn endowment is among the largest for public universities, while the vast majority have far less.

The president of the University of Virginia is resigning following pressure from the Trump administration to step aside amid a Justice Department investigation into the school’s diversity practices.

James E. Ryan convened a meeting with his senior leadership Friday and announced that he would be stepping down, according to a source who attended the UVA Board of Visitors meeting.

The Justice Department had demanded Ryan step down to resolve an investigation over the school’s diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, according to The New York Times, which was first to report the news of his resignation.

In a letter to the university community on Friday, Ryan said, “I am writing, with a very heavy heart, to let you know that I have submitted my resignation as President of the University of Virginia.”

“To make a long story short, I am inclined to fight for what I believe in, and I believe deeply in this University,” Ryan wrote. “But I cannot make a unilateral decision to fight the federal government in order to save my own job. To do so would not only be quixotic but appear selfish and self-centered to the hundreds of employees who would lose their jobs, the researchers who would lose their funding, and the hundreds of students who could lose financial aid or have their visas withheld.”

The university’s governing Board of Visitors voted in March to end its DEI office under the Trump administration’s order that U.S. schools end diversity programs or risk losing federal funding. Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin had praised the decision, saying the board “voted for common sense.”

University of Virginia President Jim Ryan during a memorial service on Nov. 19, 2022, in Charlottesville, Va. Mike Kropf / Pool via Getty Images file

“DEI is done at the University of Virginia. We stand for the universal truth that everyone is created equal, and opportunity is at the heart of Virginians’ and Americans’ future,” he said in a March 7 news release.

But the Justice Department accused the school of failing to dismantle DEI and sent a letter dated June 17 warning that it needed to act fast, the NYT reported.

The DOJ and the University of Virginia did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Friday.

Speaking at a meeting of the university’s governing board in early June, Robert D. Hardie, a member whose term expires Monday, praised Ryan’s leadership and noted the institution’s excellence in academic rankings and sports and in producing Rhodes Scholars since he started as president in 2018.

“I list all these metrics to highlight the remarkable job that Jim Ryan is doing, and the data that shows how well he has done as our President,” Hardie said, according to a transcript of his remarks. “We can all agree or disagree about many things, but the numbers are impressive.”

The state’s two senators, Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, both Democrats, said in a joint statement Friday that it was “outrageous that officials in the Trump Department of Justice demanded the Commonwealth’s globally recognized university remove President Ryan.”

They called him a “strong leader” who served the school “honorably and moved the university forward.”

“Virginia’s economy and prosperity depend on the strength and integrity of our higher education system,” the senators said. “Decisions about UVA’s leadership belong solely to its Board of Visitors, in keeping with Virginia’s well-established and respected system of higher education governance. This is a mistake that hurts Virginia’s future.”

Peter McDonough, vice president and general counsel of the American Council on Education, a higher education trade association, said the reported pressure on Ryan reflects the Trump administration’s broad sense of power even as federal law might not always back it up.

“Congress has passed no statute that purports to allow the executive branch to micromanage aspects of a university — I think we could actually say the opposite,” McDonough said, citing federal law that prohibits federal “direction, supervision, or control” of any educational institution.

Ryan’s resignation may signal a historic disruption for higher education, which he describes as a “mosaic of different types of higher ed institutions, public and private, large and small, that actually drew their collective strength from being independent and different,” McDonough said.

Now they may need to align with the winner of the last presidential election, he said, adding, “That’s a worry.”

Armand Alacbay, senior vice president of strategy at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a nonprofit group focused on higher education governance, said an institution’s leadership is the domain of its governing board. The resignation is a product, he said, of unprecedented “governmental intrusion.”

“I think there’s grave danger to the quality and future of higher education if these type of decisions become a function of the federal government,” Alacbay said.

The school’s board accepted Ryan’s resignation, The New York Times reported. He was the ninth president to lead the university since the position was first filled in 1905.

Peter McDonough:

Well, I hope it doesn’t. But we should all be concerned that it may.

I wouldn’t have seen this coming. but, frankly, I should have and maybe more of us should have. Back in 2021, the vice president, appearing at a National Conservatism Conference, said we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country. He said it in a speech titled, “The Universities Are the Enemy.”

That should worry us all. That should worry us on all ends of the political spectrum. It should worry us whether we are in statehouses or state legislatures, whether we are on the boards of public universities or whether we are on the boards or in leadership positions of private colleges and universities, because we don’t have a federal system of higher education.

We have a mosaic that’s made up of publics and privates, small and large, religious-based and not. And I think we can all agree that, over the decades, this mosaic of higher education has really, truly been the envy of the world. It’s why people come here to go to college. And it’s produced the economic vitality that we have experienced here. It’s enabled us to have a level of national security and health benefits.

It allowed us to address some of the largest problems in medicine with a power that, frankly, starts in most instances in the research labs on our college campuses. And all of this is at risk.